Lawsuit filed by former Color Labs employee confirms Apple acquisition of engineers and IP

A lawsuit filed against Color Labs by ex-employee Adam Witherspoon confirms that Apple is acquiring Apple for Color's engineers and intellectual property.

It appears that even if Color is heading in the right direction, the troubled startup can’t avoid controversy. A lawsuit by former Color engineer, Adam Witherspoon, unveiled by TechCrunch reveals the drama going on at the company, as well as confirmed that Color’s talent and technology has been acquired by Apple. However the value of the deal wasn’t mentioned, although rumors suggest Color was to be acquired for approximately tens of millions of dollars.

The document affirms that Color’s CEO, Bill Nguyen, had shopped Color around for an acquisition as early as September 2012 to Apple. Apple sat down to discuss the deal with Nguyen and 20 engineering employees to sort out the deal, seeing as how Apple made it clear that it was interested in acquiring Color’s entire engineering team and intellectual property. However Witherspoon was left out of the discussion and ultimately became the sole engineer to be excised from the Apple acquisition deal. He was instead left with an unusually low severance package despite his history and position in the company.

For the record, Apple acquired Nguyen’s first company, Lala, for $80 million deal was Lala in 2009. 

When Color received its infamous $41 million in funding lead by Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank, the company had six pending patents. The patents, including “Sharing content among multiple devices,” will likely be wrapped up into Apple and its Photo Stream product. The details of some of these patents can be found published here. Color’s website has published a notification stating that the app will finally be put to rest at the end of December. 

While the lawsuit clues us into the deal with Apple, it also sheds some light on the sudden departure of Nguyen, who recently stepped back from day-to-day operations with the company. This initially thought to be a result of internal strife within the company, although Nguyen chalked up his leave to going on a sabbatical. “I take off for a while and I vacation. It’s nothing new or exciting,” Nguyen told TechCrunch in September.

The complaint suggests otherwise. The document indicates that on July 17, 2012, board member Doug Leone sent a company-wide email notifying employees that Nguyen was stepping down and that, “it was the Board’s fault that things had gotten to that point and that the Board should have been more involved with the way Color was run.”

If you want an entertaining read, we suggest digging into the rest of the lawsuit — it’s the stuff of melodramatic soap operas … at least, one focused on a doomed young startup. 

View the original article here

What's in a color? The influence of Nokia on Microsoft design.

Microsoft all of a sudden loves cyan & magenta, we wonder why. Oh, right...

Throw this under just observations we’ve noticed in the last few months with some of Microsoft’s new hardware but it looks to us like they are adopting some of Nokia’s more bold design efforts.

The latest being the usage of cyan and magenta for some of their hardware, like the Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500, which gained two new Nokia colors this week.

These colors look familiar

Whether it’s the Surface coming with a cyan or magenta cover/keyboard, the new mouse colors, Nokia’s Lumia line or the new color schemes in Windows 8, Microsoft seems to have ripped some of the design principles right of Nokia’s book.

Or perhaps this is part of that deeper partnership growing between the two companies? After all, they are swapping services with each other and working closely on that whole Windows Phone thing, so much so that both companies are doing a joint-press conference on September 5th. That’s a first for Windows Phone.

Those design principles are really nothing new, of course. Nokia discussed this at length on their Conversations blog in the past, describing the theory on colors. In an interview with Tiina Aarras, a design at Nokia, the following inspiration was presented for the Lumia line of colors:

Returning to the idea of purity, Aarras was inspired by the CMYK colour group (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black) which was invented as a primary colour group for printing when newspapers began to produce colour comic strips in the 1890s.

“Those colours are pure, defined and exceptional. They’re distinctive modern design icons and people recognise them. Because these are primary colours they contrast with each other – put them together with a black glass screen, and they are ideal for producing a bold and confident approach.”

Much like Metro UI (or whatever it will be called), the focus on pure and simple colors is a brilliant and obvious design choice, one that Microsoft now seems to be embracing.

Cyan and more cyan.Yes, please!

Microsoft never received too much credit for some of their consumer hardware offerings, but their mice, webcams, keyboards and even devices like the Zune HD and yes, Kin, do push the boundaries on design with often great (but under-appreciated) results. Now with Nokia in the mix, they seem to be getting that extra edge to really have products that just “pop” when you look at them—why else is the Surface so fascinating if it weren’t for that design and those colors?

The joke in fashion is often that “black is the new black” but in this case, we’re going with cyan and magenta as being the “it” colors this year and next. Let’s watch what both Microsoft and Nokia do with colors and design over the next few months, as our bet is we’ll see even more overlap.

And we’re thrilled with that idea.

View the original article here